Sympathetic over activation is involved in a variety of cardiovascular disease, such as ventricular arrhythmias, myocardial infarction (MI), heart failure (HF), etc. Therapies that are based on autonomic modulation have shown efficacy in a variety of cardiovascular diseases in both preclinical and clinical studies. The autonomic balance can be modulated to have more parasympathetic tone by stimulating parasympathetic targets or inhibiting sympathetic targets, and can be modulated to have more sympathetic tone by stimulating sympathetic targets or inhibiting parasympathetic targets.
Spinal cord stimulation has been proposed for a variety of treatments, such as pain control. One known system for delivering electrical stimulation to neural targets in and around the spinal cord uses a lead inserted one-dimensionally into the dorsal epidural space of the spinal cord.